While display surfaces, e.g., television, projector and terminal screens, are becoming physically larger and with increased resolution, the manner in which videos are displayed has remained much the same. In general, videos produced for smaller display surfaces are simply scaled up to fill the entire display surface. Little is done to take full advantage of what a large display surface has to offer.
For example, a high-definition television (HDTV), capable of displaying 1920×1080 pixels, takes a standard definition television signal with a resolution of 640×480 pixels, and simply scales the low-resolution video to fill the high-resolution display surface.
A video is composed of a sequence of frames, which are often encoded and compressed to decrease bandwidth and memory requirements. Each frame is displayed independently of a previous or next frame. At no time do conventional devices display concurrently more than one frame from the same video.